The Elusive DNC Autopsy

In lieu of it, this is a letter sent out by DNC Chair Ken Martin

I wasn’t sure where to put this so I could point people to it, so I put it right here:

Dear DNC Members -

In 2025, the DNC underwent a comprehensive review of the Democratic political ecosystem, from the presidential level to local races. Throughout 2025, we began implementing some of these critical learnings, which supported the historic resurgence of Democratic victories across the country, including in places that haven’t been won by Democrats in generations. Democrats won or overperformed in 226 out of 254 key elections, a rate of nearly 90%.

As we’ve talked with many of our friends and partners from across the Democratic landscape, an overwhelming majority made clear that our sole focus should be on the work ahead as we enter a critical midterm year with an opportunity to limit the power of Trump and the Republicans. To that end, we made the decision to not release the full report and instead focus on implementing our findings.

I wanted you to have some details on what we found. These insights – a sampling of the learnings from our review – are based on analyses that spanned several categories, including media and communications; organizing; tech and data; and fundraising and spending. Hundreds of interviews were conducted with sources from all 50 states, and throughout that process we uncovered issues that were specific to the 2024 cycle – both presidential and down ballot – as well as many structural challenges that have deepened cycle-over-cycle.

Results-Driven Organizing: While Democrats attempted to reach more people than ever before in 2024, outreach did not change enough voters’ views of Democratic candidates or swing their vote. There are several converging factors, including: attempts increased while successful contact rates declined; organizing began too late and at too low a level in key states; peer to peer texting has failed to generate meaningful conversations, becoming a 1-way as opposed to 2- way communication method; key constituencies were not contacted during the persuasion window, and only received outreach during turnout; poor training resulted in low quality conversations with voters that didn’t move the needle. Moving forward, campaigns must leverage a suite of tactics, including:

Altering incentive structures and measuring programs not by the number of attempted calls or knocks, but by the number of voters effectively engaged or impactful conversations completed.

Investing in innovative digital and relational organizing tools that have the capacity to reach voters that traditional methods are missing.

Modernizing to move beyond tracking doors knocked and calls made, so we can measure qualitative insights.

Investing in long-term party building efforts including funding for state parties as year-round organizing infrastructure, developing better talent pipelines and training programs, and resourcing an expanded electoral map and not simply current battlegrounds.

The youth ‘swing vote’: Democrats have long taken the youth vote for granted, and we learned that mistake in 2024. Young voters are emerging as a new swing coalition. In 2024, Trump won a majority of all first-time voters, and received an 11-point increase in youth support compared to 2020. Updating our party’s media mix for paid investments and engaging further with non-traditional media, as explored further below, is one of many ways to address this challenge.

Media mix: Democrats did spend more on CTV and digital ads than Republicans in 2024, but given our reliance on cord-cutting, digital-native younger Americans who rarely engage with broadcast or cable TV, this delta needs to get wider. In addition, Trump’s overperformance with young voters was bolstered by a network of right-wing digital media publishers. Democrats must play catch up – scaling up both strategic investments and “earned” engagement with new media. Influencer engagement should also be paired with organizing tactics, reflecting how the right wing media ecosystem deploys influencers to drive turnout and organize voters.

Modernizing Democratic Tech and Data:

The resilience of Democratic infrastructure was tested repeatedly in 2024.

Scale Issues: A massive swell of enthusiasm after Kamala Harris became the candidate put pressure on the campaign’s tools. Some core organizing capacities including campaign events in Mobilize and data loading into NGP-VAN showed signs of strain, forcing the Harris campaign and DNC to develop workarounds and backup plans.

Unprecedented Outside Attacks: The campaign and DNC were forced to put massive effort into preventing major outages due to a sophisticated series of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on targeted party campaign infrastructure and partner tools at peak times, reaching millions of requests per second from thousands of source IPs.

The DNC is taking action to ensure we continue modernizing and protecting our critical infrastructure, including issuing a RFP focused on “tools and technologies that will power the next generation of organizing” and piloting a number of new tools in 2025 races – voter and volunteer data management systems, platforms for moving volunteers to take action, and tools for engaging with, and listening to, voters in new ways.

Listening to voters: In 2024, voters were telling us what they cared about and we were not responsive to these concerns. This was evident on issues like public safety and immigration – where Democrats operated from a defensive or avoidant posture, ceding ground to Republicans – as well as on the economy – which was messaged on but with a massive credibility gap. Going forward, Democrats must listen to what voters’ concerns are and actually address those issues head on in our messaging.

Our North Star: Winning

Here’s our North Star: winning elections. To that end, we are aligned on what’s important, and that’s learning from the past and winning the future.

Democrats are on the march towards winning back Congress in 2026 – we’re laser focused on the midterms, and every member of our ecosystem should have their sights trained on building toward those victories.

I want to personally thank each and every one of you for being a crucial part of our successes so far in 2025, and look forward to working together as a team to continue winning.

Happy Holidays and all the best as we head into 2026.

Sincerely,

Ken Martin

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